Here are quotations and illustrations, with brief explanations where required, to motivate students for fourteen difficult situations (facing an important exam, procrastination, resisting peer pressure, addiction to social media, worry, lacking talent, and so on) they commonly face.

Have you ever sabotaged your chances in an exam because you were overly nervous?

Have you blanked-out, even for minutes?

Or have you find it difficult to concentrate while taking a test?

Burdened by expectations, fear of failure, and poor time management skills among other reasons, many students face these situations.

According to this study, 25 to 40 percent of students experience test anxiety. And, as you may have experienced, anxiety can have deleterious effect on your performance. One study found that highly test-anxious students score about 12 percentile points below their less anxious peers. This is average, though; some, of course, perform way below this.

You may be prepared to the teeth, but test-anxiety may still undo weeks and months of hard work in a matter of few hours.

You would’ve heard it all – eat every 2-3 hours, don’t have too much caffeine, keep hydrated, eat healthy, and so on.

But do you know that certain types of food, which also happen to be the most regularly consumed by students, can send your energy level soaring to the top of the rollercoaster, and in short time, to its lowest point. And this crash can deprive you of the much needed energy to focus on the task at hand, including studying, something you can prevent by a better choice of what you eat or drink.

Imagine, this happening during an important day, say the day you’re taking an important test or the day you really need to slog at high efficiency to pull off that last-minute submission.

In this post, I’ll analyze the aforesaid data, using independent data on yield, number of dual admits, and number of accepted applicants, and show why it is not representative of the choices made by HBS-Stanford dual admits in the class of 2014.

Robert McNamara, former Secretary of Defense, United States, is widely believed to be the first person to score the perfect 800 in GMAT. If you Google ‘Robert McNamara GMAT 800’, you’ll find several articles and forums supporting this.

An ant, with great effort, was dragging a portion of a leaf several times its size towards its home, a small hole in the ground. On the way, it came across a small crack – a crevasse for its size – on the ground. Unable to find a way to go across, the ant stopped. It stayed there for a while trying different things, but couldn’t find a way. Eventually, after several attempts to find a way around, it put the leaf on the crack and walked over it to cross over to the other side.

After crossing the crack, it resumed its journey and soon reached the hole. What happens next frustrates it.

As a beginner, when you shoot basketballs to the hoop, solve calculus problems, or perform in front of an audience, you typically meet with disappointment. Progress, often, is slow and tortuous. And failures, common.

During this phase, many wonder, “How come others do the same things so effortlessly?”